Oh, it’s certainly easier to lay back and wait than it is to chuck projectiles.
My contention, though, was that it’s less chicken-sh!t (“Honda takes more balls”). Holding down back doesn’t pressure the opponent into doing anything, and there’s no way to deal free block damage by doing that. Neither does it cut off the entire lower half of the screen as an attack avenue.
I’m looking at the big picture. Yeah, Honda can turtle up and play it safe, but he can’t make his opponent dance by doing that. He’s a passive threat, and if he gets behind, that strategy becomes virtually useless. On the other hand, Guile, Dee Jay, RyuKen, etc. can just throw sh!t as a viable strategy at any point in the game.
Note that Honda dies to projectile throwers, not vice versa.
Sure there is. It’s useless if Honda doesn’t have the lead, which is precisely what he has difficulty achieving vs. projectile throwers. Turtling up when he’s not ahead is the worst thing he could do.
Eliminating stored ochio sounds like a good place to start.
Sure, but the problem is one of paradox. How does one make Honda better vs. FB characters WITHOUT adversely affecting him vs. non-FB characters, and vice versa? Seems you’ve got no choice but to either make him better vs. FB chars. and then change everyone else to make them better vs. Honda, or make him worse vs. non-FB chars. and then power down all the projectile throwers.
Honda is like a slider between two extremes. The more he goes in one direction, the more he leaves the weak side in the dust, OR the more he gets brought down to their level, thereby making him even worse against the FB chars. The only solution is to crank him up, then crank up everyone else that he beats, OR crank him down, then drag down the FB chars. along with him.
The way I see it, Sirlin’s focus for balancing was around the top tier characters and fireball characters in giving more options against those characters, E.Honda included.
While E.Honda matches are retarded, in theory characters like Fei Long may be able to at least take on other good characters.
Right, but my main point is that Honda’s is easier, and thus, vastly more annoying. It just means that my expert Cammy can still die to a decent Honda, whereas my expert Cammy will destroy a decent Ryu.
But it turns out that this wasn’t Milo’s point in the first place. So nevermind.
Yeah, it really doesn’t. I’m 100% for strengthening the other characters to help against Honda, as I said to Milo that his point holds more water because Cammy and crew die to more people than just Honda. I was mainly just pointing out that in general it’s better to fix the problem than it is to try and buff up everyone else because, conversely, it is easier to buff up the person who has trouble against one common tactic than it is to weaken everyone else to make up for his weakness. The only reason why the argument doesn’t work is because Cammy and Fei and Hawk just in general have a harder time winning against anyone. If that WASN’T the case, however, would you agree that a nerfing to Honda WOULD be the preferable course of action?
But I don’t believe that for a second. Get ready for a caps explosion! He was definitely going for a more healthy pancake. Otherwise, what’s the point of Remix mode? I’d rather play the original, then.
The REASON I don’t believe that is because characters like Bison got lower-invincible Devil’s Reverses SPECIFICALLY to deal with Ryu and Ken. Honda got four things to SPECIFICALLY deal with the way he dies to Fireball characters. Guile got a better Flash Kick SPECIFICALLY to deal with Vega’s slide. He was definitely trying to make a much healthier pancake. The thing that I got frustrated with is that the ONLY person who got anything to SPECIFICALLY deal with Honda was Bison! And Bison is ALREADY good with only a few match up problems. The only changed in Fei, Hawk, or Cammy was that Cammy’s Jumping Strong was nerfed to SPECIFICALLY help Dhalsim (WTF?!?!?!?).
Sirlin was definitely trying to balance things out, it’s just that some characters got balanced much better than others.
Hmm. I actually still disagree. I think using Honda… well, I know when I use him, I feel like a total bitch coward. shrug Maybe it’s just because my Ryu sucks so bad.
I guess it’s just a difference of mindsets, then. I’d prefer to fight someone that makes me dance as opposed to makes me fall asleep. At least shit is happening.
You said it yourself: turtling is useless against Projectile characters, right? Hurt his turtling, and it affects not the fights against Projectile characters. Easy. Then improve his offense, and it helps against Projectile characters but NOT against the characters he currently beats.
Again, if it were my choice, I would like to improve Cammy and Fei and the lot to fight Honda better, as opposed to nerfing Honda. I would just really like to know what ideas you have to make Cammy and Fei fight Honda better, because as Honda is, the way he’s designed, whatever you did to Cammy and Fei to make them be better against Honda will result in them destroying everyone else. I honestly cannot come up with anti-Honda-specific tools to give to Fei and Cammy to make that fight not uber-lame.
“… we sorted out that there were these ‘best’ [playing] characters, and there were these ‘worst’ characters. We’re trying to compress these tiers, so the best characters are still good, but are a little worse.”
Sirlin is smart enough to know that balancing the game tends toward Karate Champ, i.e. all characters much the same.
The second you make one character different from the others, poof, there goes your balance.
The real trick in balancing a fighting game is not trying to achieve 5/5 match-ups across the board (that’s easy to do), but rather finding how far you can foist equality of outcomes on your players at the cost of variety. Most people who say that they want more balance actually prefer more variety, they just don’t know it (until they play Karate Champ).
Now I suppose you two will spend a page arguing about whether the goal was “balance” or simply “more balance.”
Uh, the change to jab headbutt did exactly what you are claiming is a paradox. As did the change to jumping fierce, as did the change to jumping short. None of these changes really factor in vs non-fireball chars.
I’ll say this much, if I was going to further tweak Honda that’s certainly the route I’d go. My changes on top of remix would be something like:
Jab Headbutt (Nerf) - Zero, or almost zero, invincibility BUT make it hit on the first frame like Blanka. That way you can still use it as a reversal, it’s just not a super great one. To the people this scares, keep in mind he can also still reversal with ochio, butt-stomp, and super. Sure, sometimes those aren’t as optimal, but that’s precisely the point.
Jab Headbutt (Buff) - Make the start-up of the move also nullify projectiles.
Super (Buff) - Make the start-up of the move also nullify projectiles.
Super (Buff) - Make it eat 5 fireballs so that he can go through Akuma’s red fireball and Ryu’s super.
Super (Buff) - Restore the ability to store it.
Super (Buff) - Remove the gap where he can be reversal SRK’d between the two hits. If it’s impossible to remove the gap, then make him invincible during the gap.
Ochio (Nerf) - Remove the ability to store it.
Ochio (Buff) - Restore the way he lands back to the way it was in ST. But leave the nerfed dizzy he does in remix. Or maybe allow him to choose which way he lands by allowing you to do the move with HCB or HCF.
Floaty Jump FP (Buff) - Make it even more floaty than in remix.
Jumping Short (Buff) - Make it even better than remix so that even a sweep at max distance doesn’t work.
Of course none of this will happen. To be honest, I’ll be surprised if Akuma gets tweaked. But since we’re talking just for fun, I’d start out with something like that and see how it worked.
Just a general observation about character balance in this game:
Just forgetting about the bottom 5 tier for a moment it seems like this game has been balanced extremely well amongst the former top and middle tier characters (excluding Akuma obviously). You go into any matchup with one of these characters and theres always a way or at least a sliver of opportunity to get a win. This makes for imo an extremely rich metagame in HD remix with these characters which was missing in tournament play of super turbo, where there was a definite gap between the top and middle tiers. In that sense the rebalancing has definitely succeeded.
Most of the experts of the bottom tier characters are justifiably complaining that not enough care was taken in the rebalancing to make the specific kind of changes that would be needed to help their character in their bad matchups. When you think about it though it makes sense why that happened though. Simply put Sirlin could not have had the experience in matchups involving bottom tier characters because simply put there is a dearth of players of these characters who are tournament competitive. By contrast hes had a lot of exposure and hence a preponderance of knowledge about the matchups of the top and mid tier characters, and so was able to make a measured and nuanced rebalancing effort for them.
Lacking this knowledge for bottom tier characters Sirlin had to be more conservative in rebalancing them, and hence they have not really been able to move up to the level of the other characters in their matchups. So yeah, I think its kind of understandable why the bottom tier characters didn’t get as good of a rebalancing job. Imo though we shouldn’t underestimate the balance that has been achieved for a majority of the cast, and I think we can all appreciate the depth of value that this balance brings to gameplay.
Edit: Also a random thought I had, what if Akuma does get tweaked, but they do a half assed job of it, like just fixing a couple normals or something. Its possible then that he might be tournament legal but still broken in the sense that hes far and away the best character. That imo is opening up a pretty big can of worms, and for that reason I’m not so sure that making a balance patch for him, or at least one that doesn’t nerf the shit out of him, would help out.
Now before you say it’s no big deal, I was on my messing around account, superscrub2000, using Honda.
I ran into him and he was using T hawk. I took him to the third round and was about an inch away from beating him.
Later on I ran into him while he was using blanka. I beat him two rounds to zero! But wait, before you say that’s not a big deal, remember that I just STARTED using Honda yesterday. I don’t even really know how to ochio throw, it just comes out on accident sometimes.
I just know how to 1) headbutt, 2) handslap 3) tick throw 4) super… sometimes. It’s only maybe 75% reliable on the control pad.
Isn’t that ridiculous? Maybe there is something to this Honda thing. Because technicalmonkey’s an advanced player right? I don’t even consider myself an advanced user and my Honda is straight up SCRUB. It’s a small sample size I know, but I could never take a round off any advanced player using other players I don’t know well.
I think that’s the trap a lot of people are falling into. All it really means is that Honda is easy to pick up and play. If you played Dhalsim for a day, you’d probably do miserably, even in his good match-ups. But that doesn’t mean he sucks.
Well he has ochio, buttslam, and jab, strong, fierce, short, forward, roundhouse. I did use a couple roundhouses and jump short to tick throw. But I didn’t touch the other buttons except to do special moves.
I always thought he was easy to pick up and play and I rip through beginners with him, despite just picking him up recently. But beating real players? Does that sound at least a little strange?
For a while I thought someone was just spoofing his name but I don’t know how you’d do that with that combination of letters. And his rank did go down during that period.
Against Hawk the only normal you ever need to do is the long range roundhouse (towards + rh?) because it beats mashed low jabs from far enough away that you don’t have to be too scared of Hawk jumpins.
That’s oversimplification but only slightly.
Balance at the lower levels does mean something, especially in a game that is trying to pull people in who haven’t played SF in a long while. Obviously you don’t want to ruin high-level competitive balance so that average XBL players can have a good time but it’s worth some consideration.
PSN lag sucks bad for STHD. Jump attacks and ticks are overpowered and it’s difficult to turtle well since it’s not always possible to respond with your usual counter in time. If you really want to have a decent match, play someone in your region of the country on GGPO ST. Better yet, play in real life where you’ll see that E.Honda is nowhere near as good as his online incarnation seems. But yeah, Honda does dominate both online (high tier back when 2DF ST had online tiers) and at intermediate levels (he was actually considered top tier in the very early days of JP X).
A lot of people are playing on HDTVs. Not sure if this was a factor here but my HDTV screen lags so much, I have to deliberately reversal a bit earlier than what I see on screen (and yes, this does mess up offline timing so I generally don’t even go for it). Other players are on TVs with much faster upscaling or on CRTs with no lag. Being a few frames ahead of your opponent is a big advantage.
The matchups were bad and TechnicalMonkey, although a great player, doesn’t play either of those characters competitively. Good players are rarely experts at a lot of characters; sometimes, they just want to experiment around. If you ran into him playing any character except Chun Li, he’s not even playing remotely serious.
So factor everything in and it doesn’t seem so shocking. I think it speaks more to how awful STHD’s netcode is.
I posed this question to Milo, and I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it myself. I mean, I consider myself a fairly clever and intelligent person, but I still have not yet come up with a good answer to this. So now, I will pose this question to anyone who is willing to try and answer it:
What would you do to Fei Long and Cammy to make them so they can actually fight Honda without making them demolish the rest of the cast?
It’s like margalis said… are you gonna give them a Fireball or a Balrog-fast missile attack? The only other move I can think of that outright beats Honda’s Jab Headbutt is the Jab Psycho Crusher. That move works because its hitting box is so much father in front of its hittable box, and it travels so slow that in the time it takes for Honda’s Jab Headbutt to run out of invincibility, Bison doesn’t get close enough for Honda to hit Bison before Bison can hit him. So can we give Cammy and Fei Long Jab Psycho Crusher-like moves?
So let’s look at this carefully… how do other characters fight Honda?
Ryu, Ken, Chun Li, Guile, Dhalsim, Dee Jay, Sagat, Akuma - Fireball Blanka, Balrog - Super fast safe Special Move Vega - ??? Zangief, T.Hawk - Superior throw range on SPDs to make Honda not want to turtle too extensively. Bison - Jab Psycho Crusher Fei Long, Cammy - Nothing
Giving Cammy and Fei Long SPDs would be ridiculous, and making Rekka Kens and Cannon Drills super fast and safe like Blanka and Balrog would also be ridiculous… they’d destroy everyone else. Both characters should also never get a Fireball. The Jab Psycho Crusher-like move seems to be the only option left. Is there any other creative way to goad Honda away from D/B that’s not listed above? What makes Honda weaker in games like SFIV? Why is he not super high-quality turtle in that game?
I’m really interested in analyzing this from a less flame-war and more productive/scientific approach. It’s also a good way to teach us just how hard of a job it is that Sirlin decided to take up trying to rebalance this game. Maybe the end answer really is: just let Cammy and Fei Long die to Honda. Fix up Hawk and Gief to be able to fight him, since they are closer to obtaining that goal, and just leave it be.
All of your points are valid, and it was just one game. Anything can happen really.
It’s just that, my Honda is so scrubby. I don’t even use him the way you guys talk about using him. I’m constantly on the offensive with varying headbutts and slaps and then jump in tick throws when I can. Basically I just know that bear hug and chip damage are efficient so I try to get in for those. I’m probably playing him all wrong.
I just wanted to see what the fuss was all about and he does seem super competitive in unskilled hands. That’s my observation at least.
IIRC, SF4 Honda’s jab headbutt has no reversal properties, he has to waste 1/4 of super meter to do the job. HHS was worse range and does very little chip damage. Also, Ochio has a whiff animation and I think it can’t be stored. That’s all I can come up with. Another thing to note is that both Cammy and Fei are console only characters so it’ll be interesting to see those two match ups in that game. He just might turn out to be a super turtle in against them in that game as well(if he has EX stored up).
In CvS2, he has to Roll Cancel his Headbutt to get that property, which makes him vulnerable to throws during startup. So instead of just doing it, there’s much more incentive to mix it up with Ochio/super. Ochio has a whiff animation and I’m pretty sure it can’t be stored.
To answer your question, I really don’t know. If the stipulation is that Honda himself cannot be changed from his Remix version then I’m stumped. I would just nerf Honda a bit in his defense and buff Cammy/Fei with the stuff I mentioned earlier. But if Honda stays the same then those buffs don’t mean much.
My answer to how I’d fix Cammy/Fei to fight against Honda.
Cammy, I’d make the Spin Knuckle beat Headbutts clean. Increase invincibility height on it to go through headbutt (I’d need to see the hitbox), and have it hit Honda. I’d also maybe change the hitbox on Cammy’s jumping short to make it clean headbutts very easily, the same way Chun’s stomp cleans Dee Jay’s Upkick.
Fei, Change #1, increase the window time you have to do Rekkas 2 and 3, and make RH Chicken Wing work like regular ST. Vs Honda, have crouching fierce cause the headbutt to whiff perhaps, or have it maybe clean the headbutt?
I’d also give Oichio a whiff and remove stored oichio.
So nevermind.
